San Francisco

On Post Street in San Francisco’s Japantown, there’s a building that doesn’t look like its neighbors. It’s modern, and covered in chrome and glass. Inside, Japanese pop music pumps through speakers.

The New People building is dedicated to Japanese pop culture -- street fashion like the frilly “Lolita” style, or manga and anime, Japanese comics and animated cartoons. But just up the street lives the older, slower Japantown -- where it’s more about bonsai and taiko than robots and platform boots.

All week long, we've been playingthis sound, and asking you to guess what exactly it is and where exactly in the Bay Area we recorded it.

This auditory guessing game is part of Audiograph, a crowd-sourced collaborative radio project mapping the sonic signature of each of the Bay Area’s nine counties. By using the sounds of voices, nature, industry, and music, Audiograph tells the story of where you live, and the people who live there with you. Every Thursday, we reveal the origins of that week's sound on Crosscurrents, and here in weekly blog posts.

"In an art-themed version of the movie axiom, 'if you build it, they will come,' the San Francisco Arts Commission (SFAC) hopes to draw locals and tourists alike to Treasure Island — and not just for its views.

LGBTQ rights made huge strides recently with the supreme court’s historic decision on same-sex marriage. But an ongoing situation in San Francisco’s Mission District shows that there’s still pushback, even in the most liberal of cities.

Public infrastructure – parks, libraries, roads, and sidewalks – surrounds us. But have you ever wondered how any of it actually came into being? A lot needs to happen to create a park – from coming up with the idea in the first place, to environmental reviews, construction, and of course, getting the money to pay for it. In San Francisco, funding for these projects needs to be approved by voters, as was the case with 2012’s Proposition B, which gave the city permission to borrow $195 million to renovate parks, including Golden Gate Park

Drewes Meats (soon to be known as E & J Fine Meats) in San Francisco is one of the oldest butcher shops in all of California -- it’s been at its current location on Church Street in Noe Valley since 1889. In this audio postcard, butcher Joseph Napier gives us a peek behind the scenes to show us “how the sausage gets made.”

It’s been 50 years since the original band members of The Grateful Dead began playing together in clubs around Palo Alto and San Francisco. In that time they’ve sold 35 million records. But more importantly, they inspired an unprecedented culture of fandom –

Today’s local music is by Natalie Cressman & Mike Bono. They’ve been working together since last year, and have put together a program of original music that combines indie rock and contemporary jazz. The Natalie Cressman – Mike Bono Duo will be sharing their sounds on Friday (07.03) at the Red Poppy Art House in San Francisco. You can expect the music to begin around 7:30pm.

The Hot Club of San Francisco will be opening for Randy Newman on Sunday (06.28) at San Francisco’s Stern Grove Festival. It’s the festival’s 78th year, and it’s free, as always. But get there early for good seats. Music starts at 2pm.

The next time you're in San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf, if you look carefully you’ll see a symbol of this support: a black cross drawn in marker. It’s the coat of arms for the Black Sheep, the area’s unofficial homeless first aid squad.

“The goal is Zero Waste by 2020, and we think that is an achievable goal.”

Those words from former San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom back in 2009 promoted the idea of diverting all waste from landfills. It was actually an official resolution passed back in the Willie Brown Administration. Now in 2014, Mayor Ed Lee claims the city has reached 80% diversion. Whether or not that debatable claim is true, there’s a long way to go to reach the goal. So what’s it going to take to achieve zero waste by 2020?

Gay Semiotics is a set of two dozen iconic photographs with embedded text, presented as a tongue-in-cheek anthropological essay on the codes of sexual orientation and identification in 1970s San Francisco. They’re on view through June 27 - for the first time in San Francisco since 1977 - at Ratio 3 gallery, 2831A Mission St.

Punk rock started as a kind of music for people who didn’t fit in. San Francisco, a city that has long been a place for outsiders to make their own communities, was one of the centers of this movement.

San Francisco was also on the forefront when it came to women joining the punk scene. Enter Penelope Houston. In 1976, she and some friends started one of the most influential San Francisco punk bands ever—The Avengers.

I’m inside what looks like it could be a college library or a research institute. People sit quietly working at desks and tables, surrounded by shelves full of periodicals and rows of storage boxes that are neatly indexed by color and symbol. Lydia Athanasopoulou shows me around. She’s the senior content coordinator here -- kind of like the head librarian.

KALW’s Julie Caine sat down with Amber Hasselbring to talk about nature corridors.

Over 830,000 people live in San Francisco and that number is growing. Yet beneath the dense urban atmosphere is a hidden world that goes about its own business and even has its very own roads. Well, you might call them roads, they're actually nature corridors that connect one habitat to another.

Take a trip back to the '70s with San Francisco author Mark Abramson. His memoir, "Sex, Drugs, and Disco" chronicles the story of gay men flooding into the Castro from all over the country to find more freedom. A time of cheap drinks, cheap sex, lots of drugs, and penicillin trucks. Another chapter in the history of gay San Francisco as Pride month begins. Marilyn hosts. Out In The Bay, this Thursday June 5th at 7pm.